So RAW is “in”. But what benefits does it provide? Well, for starters, a lot more control over the image. Two biggest benefits are: white balance adjustment & exposure compensation. But with RAW images, comes more work. It could be a very painful process, or a very easy and simple process. One of the easiest ways of making it a very painful process is to delay processing your RAW images as long as possible. I made the mistake of putting it off and now I have 8 DVDs worth of RAW images that need to be processed. And since I never truly sat down and analyzed my workflow I had not optimized my processes to be efficient and painless. As they say, hindsight is 20/20 but I’m glad I did what I did. When I first got my Canon camera, I shot both JPG+RAW because I knew how to work with JPG images but not RAW but I knew at some point RAW would be where I wanted to be. Now I have to go back in time and “catch up” to now. A reasonably time consuming task.

Another quick way to make it inefficient and slow is to repeat tasks several times. This can be accomplished by choosing the wrong software or by doing things out of order. For example, some programs are aware of Adobe’s XMP sidecar files while others are not. Trying to decide what software is right for you is a difficult process because you can either lock yourself into using a single software package or have to re-do some work at a later date to transition your image assets to a more standard format. Decisions!

Onto my workflow…

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This weekend was interesting. I’m pretty sure I have some form of an Attention Deficit Disorder because I have a 5 minute attention span and get bored extremely fast. Especially if I am doing a repetitive task that can’t be automated. I wound up going through all of my photos and removing the JPG images from the RAW+JPG combinations.
Then I was able to go through my most recent RAW folder and keyword, label and rate all the photos. I deleted what I rated as a “1 star image”. And convert that to the Adobe DNG format.
As it stands, 1 folder down, 7 more to go.

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Well, I finished the task of organizing everything on the physical layer and made a backup (Phase I), which already came in handy since I somehow nuked 3 images. I have a total of 8 DVDs worth of photos. Each ~4 gb chunk consists of subfolders containing the location & approximate date of the last shot. Now the logical sorting begins but I ran into a minor problem. Apparently Photoshop/Bridge do not come with a quick and easy way to analyze the technical qualities of the photo. Primarily the focus of the photo. There’s the slide show option but that does not have a nifty Magnifier tool like Raw Shooter Essentials/Professional has. As I was typing this, I searched for an XMP aware image viewer and came up with Photo Mechanic 4.4.2 which does exactly what I need to solve my problem. It lets me preview the images @ 100% and it’s quick.

On a side note, yesterday evening i had a brilliant idea that my computer needed more RAM (which it did, with only 640mb). As I pulled out some ram out of my other computers I got a little ambitious and figured since I’m already moving stuff around I might as well get my fastest computer and put the video card & ram in there and slowly move my stuff from this computer (second fastest) to the faster one. Well, I put the memory chips in and it kept giving me a continuous beep which was a memory problem. I fiddled with the memory some more and accidentally put in the stick of memory the wrong way. Well, once I powered up the PC I heard a crackling sound and a very distinct smell coming from within the PC. I quickly turned the PC off and analyzed the situation. Testing the memory in the other computer resulted in all 3 modules still working fine (I hope that’s the case). Everything showed up as 512 and worked. But the computer that it happened in did not POST or show anything on the monitor. Which probably means I fried the motherboard. After looking closely at it I did notice that one of the ICs was puffy and had a dark bubble on top of it.

Only means one thing. Time for an upgrade!

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I’ve struggled with proper image organization for years. And now I understand why.

For years I considered the optimal way of putting the photos into folders on my hard drive and I was mislead by my own mind. The issue was that you always know what you’re looking for, but you can forget what path to take to get what you want.

For example, if you go on a trip with a friend to San Francisco does that image get filed under friends, trips or san francisco? Well, it gets filed in all 3 places but how do you manage that with folders?

The answer is very easy. Use cataloging software to keep track. My organization was 1 layer of a mess. If you separate your archives into 2 layers (physical & logical) it will make your life a lot easier. The physical layer should be optimized for backup purposes. In my case, I plan on backing the archives up as follows: PC will have a pair of hard drives in mirror RAID configuration (one disk is a mirror image of another), External USB hard drive and the most important DVD disk backup. DVDs can hold ~4.7 gigs of data. I chose to keep my physical layer in 4 gig chunks.

Instead of creating folders for each project, I will just create a RAW_xx folder and put RAW files there until the 4gb threshold is reached. Then burn a DVD for arhival purposes. In there I can create sub-folders by project but if months later I shoot more photos of a bald eagle I will not put those photos into the existing baldd eagle folder in one of my RAW_xx arhives. Now, how do you keep track of all of your bald eagle photos? Easy, keywords and metadata! You can assign multiple keywords and later on searching for bald eagle will show you all the images of the bald eagle from your archive. If you want to narrow it down like “bald eagle, new jersey” it will show you only photos of bald eagles in NJ.

Nifty!

This is where my mind was broken…I thought of everything in a single layer. Now with addition of the logical layer I can reduce the amount of time I have to spend organizing the newly captured images.

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FastStone Image Viewer - Powerful and Intuitive Photo Viewer, Editor and Batch Converter

For the longest time I have been using ACDSee 3.1 as my JPG viewer. I first started using it sometime in ‘97 as my quick viewer of choice. However, over time it caught the Swiss Army Knife Syndrome which is apparently very common in the software industry. ACDSee was great at one thing and one thing only…It was one of the fastest lightweight image viewers I’ve seen (back in the day). It rendered JPGs fast. I mean real fast. And then it happened…They added on extra junk that people didn’t really need. The end result ( tried out version 8 ) was that it’s become typical bloatware. It can do lots of things, but it can’t do them well at all. For image editing there’s Photoshop CS. For organization there’s Adobe Gallery and for RAW stuff there’s Phase One and Pixmantec’s offerings which are superb, Photoshop does RAW as well. So, I Googled for an image viewer and FastStone Image Viewer came up. I figured, hey…Great, it’s even free! That’s always a plus. From what I saw in the first few minutes of using it, it’s very cool. Has a lot of nice features and isn’t terribly slow like Adobe Bridge is. Highly recommended…

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Damn you UPS! DAAAAAMN YOU TO HELL!

My aggitation with UPS stems from the fact that they are a lousy shipping service along with DHL (Airborne Express). I don’t think they give a damn about their job. Which is sad. FedEx on the other hand is always helpful and forthcoming with help when I need it. Apparently the lazy UPS man decided to just skip the pickups for the last 2 days and that’s why my Amazon return hasn’t shown up in their system. It’s just sitting downstairs along with 15 other boxes that have to go out. So, Amazon will get their wrong lens after all and I won’t be dinged for 1400$. Now let’s all hope the UPS picks up the stuff today.

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Ok, so that little screw up with the Canon EF 16-35 F/2.8 continues to be a little more nerve wrecking. I printed out the shipping label from Amazon and sealed up the wrong lens back up and dropped it off with the client’s shipping and receiving department. I’ve done this a number of times and never had any problems. This time, the tracking number did not show up in the UPS yesterday evening as I had hoped, which wasn’t that big of a deal, maybe the UPS Ground truck only does one morning pickup. So, today I checked the UPS site a few times, and it still hasn’t showed up. Now, I am worried. I don’t want to deal with UPS & Amazon claiming that I’m trying to rip them off. Also, the lens is 1400$ on Amazon so they could charge me 1400$ x 2 since they shipped me two lenses and got 0 back. This would really really suck! I’m going to stop by the Shipping & Receiving tomorrow and check out what’s going on. Maybe the box is somewhere in the corner and the UPS guy didn’t see it.

Onto the good things…The lens I got today is indeed a Canon EF 16-35 f/2.8. It’s one sexy piece of glass if you ask me. A little shy of 1.5 pounds. I took some test shots but did not check the sharpness. Focusing is very quiet & very fast, as i would expect. Sample shots will probably appear sometime soon.

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There is no way I can cover everything there is to know about RAW files and all the tricks that others know. I’ve done some research on digital workflows and my biggest frustration was that people didn’t really go into the exact motions of their workflow with an explanation of why they chose to do it that way.

My workflow is still in the process of being developed so I will modify it as necessary.

One of the best things you can do is pick up The DAM Book and read it. There’s a lot of good stuff in there about organization of images and how to tweak your RAW workflow to tailor you.

This is my take on this (navigation is also available to the right):

1. Introduction
2. Camera Setup
3. Physical Layer
4. Logical Layer

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Wow…The 16-35 f/2.8 from Amazon came today. I walked downstairs to the client’s shipping and receiving area and got the package. Got back to the lab and cracked the box open. The black/white/red box labeled Canon EF 16-35 f/2.8 was staring back at me. I opened up the lid and pulled out the warranty card which said 17-40 f/4. Confused, I pulled out the manual which also said Canon EF 17-40 f/4. Still unsure I pulled out the lens and looked at the rim. It also said 17-40 f/4. With disbelief I pulled out the packing slip and saw it say Canon 16-35 f/2.8.

Immediately I called Amazon and told them I need to return this item because the box is right but the items inside are not. I also asked them if they would cross-ship the replacement to me.

After all being said and done, Amazon did right by shipping me a replacement overnight. And letting me return the item. I’m surprised something like this would happen with a seller like Amazon.com. My theory is that Canon ran out of the 17-40 f/4 boxes and stuffed a few of the lenses into the 16-35 f/2.8 boxes. I mean, someone who didn’t know any better might have thought it was a better deal. I’d much rather opt for the inverse. A 16-35 f/2.8 in a 17-40 f/4 box.

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Amazon.com: Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L USM Ultra Wide Angle Zoom Lens for Canon SLR Cameras: Camera and Photo
You purchased this item on February 21, 2006.

Very stoked. Now I have f/2.8 all the way from 16mm to 200m and f/4 from 140mm to 400mm. The only other thing I lust for now is the EF 600mm f/4 prime lense but it’s definitely out of my price range right now

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